How-to: Make, sync your own iPhone ringtones for cheap or free

If paying $1.98 for the privilege of an iPhone ringtone from the iTunes Store …

iTunes 7.4 is among us and ringtone support has finally joined the party. It sounds like most users are able to see the ringtone bell next to purchased tracks in their libraries (hit cmd-j and enable the ringtone column if you haven't already), and the iTunes Store is now displaying the ringtone icon next to tracks that you can purchase for $.99, then pay another $.99 to turn a song you already own into a ringtone.

But what if you don't want to pay the music labels' ringtone privilege tax through the iTunes Store? Indeed, many alternative ringtone services from third parties and mobile companies charge $1.99, $2.99, or more just for a tone (and you don't even get the full length track to go with it), and some services also reportedly time bomb the ringtones so they expire after a short period of time.

With this in mind, one could argue that buying ringtones from the iTunes Store is actually a deal, since you get non-expiring versions of both the full track and any custom snippet you want from it as a ringtone for $1.98 (but we definitely agree that you shouldn't have to buy the track in order to get the 'tone). Still, some people simply don't want to pay extra to turn music they already own into ringtones, and we feel your pain. That's why we have a roundup of a few tools and tricks you can use to make your own ringtones and work around iTunes 7.4's attempts to force you to use the store.

iFuntastic

iFuntastic appeared on the iPhone hacking circuit some time ago, and it's capable of tinkering with a lot more than just your iPhone's ringtones. For the purpose of this post, however, we'll just stick to the 'tones. While iFuntastic's approach isn't quite as clean cut as other options, the app is offered as donationware and it allows you to drag and drop compatible .m4a files into your iPhone for ringtones. One major caveat to iFuntastic, however, is that (since it's a hacking tool) it requires you to 'jailbreak' your iPhone. For the general user, this doesn't mean much, but for the last two iPhone firmware updates Apple has released, any phones that had a jailbreak performed get completely wiped and restored. Now, as long as you keep all your data synched, the only thing you have to worry about backing up are the photos you've shot with the iPhone's camera; everything else gets replaced automatically by iTunes once the firmware update is finished, including any specific media synching preferences such as certain playlists, only the five most recent TV show episodes, etc.

So the moral of the iFuntastic route is: it's free, relatively easy, and this particular tool allows you to hack a lot more than your ringtones. However, the jailbreak process means you have to perform a full sync each time Apple releases new iPhone firmware.

iToner

iToner from Ambrosia Software is possibly the first third-party tool to appear that makes it dead simple to drag and drop custom ringtones into your iPhone. There's no jailbreaking here and the process truly is as simple as it sounds. As a commercial app for $15, however, I need to ding iToner for not offering much more than a drag and drop ringtone operation. For that kind of money (or possibly $5 more), I would like to see a tool similar to iTunes that allows the user to scrub across the sound file to select just the specific portion of the song to use as the actual ringtone. Otherwise users are still forced to find another tool to do their actual editing.

In time, and if Apple doesn't eventually take some sort of measure to lock out tools like iToner, I would really like to see more out of it as a commercial app. If popularity picks up, it would be nice to see some kind of ringtone library management and—an absolute must-have for a commercial app—at least some kind of basic ringtone editor.

MakeiPhoneRingtone

MakeiPhoneRingtone hails from the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba, makers of all kinds of great audio editing, capturing, and hacking tools. This more or less does what iToner does right now for free, though its UI is even more basic as it literally is a droplet for getting your AAC files into the iPhone as ringtones. iToner, on the other hand, presents a list of ringtones that you have placed on your iPhone. Then again, MakeiPhoneRingtone is offered for free, as the company is naturally using it to entice users to consider their audio editing tools for all of their ringtone hacking needs. Fission, for example, is one of their solid and reasonably-priced audio editors you could use to hack up non-iTunes-Store-DRMed files.

Good ol' QuickTime Pro

For those who own QuickTime Pro or some of Apple's other Pro products (Final Cut Studio, etc.), you already have a halfway decent tool for performing basic edits, if you're willing to do some leg work. You can just drag and drop any non-iTunes-Store-DRMed file into a QuickTime player, then mouse over the timeline to reveal a couple of simple sliders (pictured). You can use these sliders for picking out the specific portion of the track you want, then chose Edit > Trim to Selection (to get a file out of iTunes, you might have to select the song, hit cmd-r to reveal it in the Finder and then open that file with QuickTime). But here's the catch: QuickTime apparently can't save directly to the proper .m4a format, so you'll need to save to aiff or wav, import into iTunes, use iTunes' own conversion tools to turn the file into a proper aac/m4a file and then use any of the tricks in this article to actually get that 'tone onto your iPhone. You could also use the old file re-naming trick, but considering the ease of tools like MakeiPhoneRingtone and how cheap iToner admittedly is, this could be considered needless busywork.

Other editing options

There is no shortage of audio editing tools on the Mac, both commercial and free. For example: GarageBand, free with most recent Macs, can likely offer some decent editing tools, and there's always the free, open source Audacity as well. Point is: if you want to edit on a budget of "cheap or free," there are some decent tools out there that can get the job done.

Final Thoughts

Try as they might, Apple hasn't been able to stop the custom ringtone market just yet. Most of the tools listed in this article have done a great job of staying in step with any updates Apple has added to iTunes and the iPhone since their introduction, so we feel confident that they'll continue to stay on beat with future updates as well.

On a personal note: while I'm not entirely excited to buy all my ringtones through the iTunes Store, I can see the value of the store's ringtone convenience, especially for the casual ringtone downloader. Paying $1.98 for the track and a really slick tool for selecting just the portion a user wants can be an arguably small price to pay versus having to go out, find and (often times) pay for a decent audio editing tool to do the same. For those who just want a ringtone or two every now and then, paying $0.99 extra for a song one already wants or even $1.98 total really isn't that bad, considering the prices the ringtone industry already charges.

Back on topic though, we're confident that these ringtone workarounds will likely stay in step with any updates and changes that Apple might make down the road to thwart them. This is still uncharted territory, however, and anything can happen. Who knows, maybe Apple and the labels will eventually let the beat go on, easing up on the arguably small portion of the market that wants to make custom ringtones to begin with.